Saturday, February 14, 2009

What’s Going to Become of This Younger Generation?

Last night I watched an interview of Dr. Philip Ney, a Canadian psychiatrist, as he described a woman who had come for treatment with her obstreperous seven-year-old. Despite being an only child, the little girl suffered from repeated nightmares of playing with three other children, but in each dream, the other children were killed and she would awake screaming. In addition, she became extremely difficult to manage and seemed to resent her mother.

When talking with the mother alone, Dr. Ney discovered that she had had three abortions before her seven-year-old child was born. The child had never been told of the abortions, yet somehow she knew anyway.

The young girl suffered from survivors guilt, a phenomenon first studied with Holocaust survivors who suffered immensely because of the seemingly randomness of their survival while friends and family were killed. In recent decades it has come to be associated with survivors of any traumatic episode; Dr. Ney and others find it also affects at least 50 percent of the people born since the advent of easy and legal abortions.

A home where the parents have already exercised the power of life and death over their own children creates complicated relationships between the parents and the surviving children. The children want and need to be close to their parents, yet deeply fear them. At some level the children want to flee, but can not because of their emotional and material dependence.

Because they survived by being “wanted,” these children become insecure, not sure how to remain “wanted.” Often they desperately hope that having money, things, power, popularity, sports prowess, and/or good looks will make them wanted and insure their continued survival.

Hearing him speak gave me new revelations about the behavior of the young people I taught at a state university. I have a new compassion for some of the self-destructive behavior I often witnessed. But until our popular culture becomes willing to admit that abortion has any negative consequences, I have no hope except the prayer, “Lord, have mercy.”


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